Listen: The United States sent people without trial or even charges to a prison in El Salvador where they will be beaten, raped, and forced into slave labor. At least one of the over 200 alleged Venezuelan gang members is not a Venezuelan gang member and was in the US legally seeking asylum, which is something you'd think that you'd at least look into if you were sending someone to a prison in another country to be beaten, raped, and forced into slave labor. Our leaders are not only ignoring that, but they are asserting that they are all criminals and openly talking about sending American citizens to be beaten, raped, and enslaved. That's our country now.
Meanwhile, the United States is imprisoning people in awful conditions in detainment centers for overstaying their visas. The country is stripping people of student visas and green cards for merely supporting a protest movement and not committing a single crime. The country is arresting visitors for no reason and keeping them in prison cells with a single foil blanket on cement floors with fluorescent lights on for 24 hours a day for days or weeks before deporting them. The country is preventing foreigners who might have criticized the president from entering. Nations that were our closest allies are warning their residents that they may be subject to brutal treatment on a whim if they visit here. That's the United States right now.
What needs to be emphasized again and again here is the pretext for these extreme and extremist actions is the utter and complete lie that there is a crime wave of murder and rape by undocumented immigrants in gangs. It's the whole bullshit justification for the idea of an "invasion" that would trigger the Alien Enemies Act. It's the reason that's given by Republicans that the country needs to go completely bugfuck insane over immigration and, apparently, tourism. The deluge of propaganda on the right has driven half the country insane with rage that is used as a justification for racism, isolationism, and abject dickishness, and it degrades every single one of us in this tragedy of a country during the stupidest of ages we're damned to live through.
The enshittification of the United States is moving at such a rapid pace that right now that it's impossible to list all the utterly depraved fuckery that's been done in a short period of time. When I sat down to write this, I wondered if I should focus on Columbia University turning bitch when threatened by Trump or the likely closing of the Department of Education or the dragging of a federal judge through the malicious MAGA mud puddle of death threats and impeachment threats or a hundred, a thousand other things. Truly, every day in the 2025 USA is like being forced to dangle your balls over a crocodile pit. It might happen right away or it might take a while, but at some point, a hungry croc is gonna snap onto your nutsack. It's just a matter of time. (Think of this as the less poetic version of "and then they came for me.")
But I'm concentrating on the savagery being done to all kinds of immigrants and tourists from other countries because it's repellent and awful and it certainly points to what they will do to Americans soon. And I'm not just talking about sending citizens to El Salvador's torture prison, the idea of which makes both Trump and El Salvador's president, Nayib Bukele, so giddy and hard that you know they get on FaceTime and watch each other jack off to the sounds of the screaming prisoners being reamed out by guards.
I'm talking about how Americans will be treated if they cross this president and how they will be able to fuck with those of us who despise him and everything he does and are incoherently angry at the fact that somehow this orange-painted lump of Adderall, Diet Coke, and Big Macs is still alive. Fuck you, medical science, for this one thing. I pretty much promise you that they will get to us soon. If they don't fuck with us through our jobs (and I know they're gonna fuck with mine soon since I'm a liberal professor) or through the loss of government programs, they'll just come up with ways to discipline and punish us for our heresy against the MAGA madness.
I believe that, at some point soon, some American returning from visiting family in, say, Canada will be asked to open up his phone at the border by CBP. He can refuse, but he'll have his phone taken and forensically searched. And they will find texts or social media posts that are critical of the Trump administration for being such a cockhead about Canada. And they will say that he is not allowed to criticize the US when he's in another country or some invented bullshit. And they will take him into custody and send him to El Salvador or a detention facility. And when they've done it once, they will have no qualms at all about doing it a million times over while courts tell them again and again that they can't because it's illegal and unconstitutional and, instead of blatantly ignoring the courts, the Justice Department comes up with another appeal angle that delays shit and allows time to round up more of us.
Some of you reading this will say that that's ridiculous, that there's this or that law that will protect citizens, that I'm being hyperbolic for the sake of being hyperbolic. To which I can only say, calmly, without malice, "Then you haven’t been paying attention, you poor, naive motherfucker. Look at how far we've fallen in just two months. Now ask yourself where we'll be in six months. Or a year."
Oh, and spare me the cries of "That's our government, not us. Don't blame us." Until we are out there shutting shit down and using our bodies to block this government from doing such fuckery, it is us. That's the burden we all need to bear. It's all being done in our name. Every act by the government is done in our name. And that's why this shit is eating away at me.
What gets that acid churning even more intensely is that so many of us warned the leaders on our side: You have to punish motherfuckers for fucking mothers or they'll just fuck more mothers and fuck them harder. They didn't arrest the bastards who created the torture regime and the habeas-free zone at Gitmo in the Bush administration. They slow-walked the prosecution of Donald Trump because of fear of seeming vengeful. Now that the bad guys got away with so very much, fuck it, they believe they're gonna get away with it again. And it's hard to blame them.
